backup strategy

Hi - I am trying to decide upon a backup strategy and after reading posts here and some other articles I have a couple questions.

I have a 250 gb external drive. I plan to use superduper to make clones. My powerbook drive is 80 gigs. Some suggest doing this daily, weekly, and monthly. I don't have the space for that and also, want to be able to do backups with some kind of archiving.

So should I partition my external into two 80gb partitons and the remainder to archive and then do: daily and weekly clones using superduper and another application to "backup" my user files?

Or, make one 80gb partition for cloning and do that weekly or daily?

and then use the remaining space to backup user files daily. From reading, it seems that superduper is great for making a clone. but not for not incremental backups. I have dotmac backup, but have read about some problems with restoring. also, because there is no way to archive the incremental backups it does, it will eventually fill the disc. i was thinking of using synk or ibackup for this purpose (i do use dotmac to backup my docs and prefs to my idisk each night).

So really, should I be doing both a daily and weekly clone or is one sufficient and then also do incremental backups of basically my home folder. And any suggestions on software to use for incremental backups?

I just do a full drive clone once a week or so. I used to use .Mac Backup to keep another backup, but haven't done it recently. I just let my .Mac subscription expire so I don't think that will work any more.

I'd also like to hear some other people's thoughts on whether a clone backup is enough or if another archival-type backup is a good idea or if its just overkill.

When I do cloning anymore, I just use apple's command line tool. It's free, and you can clone the disk you're currently booted into.

It depends on how comfortable you are with the CLI (command line interface) but here's a link to the Manual Page For asr if you want to use that.

For other non-cloning backups, I use the ditto command (found @ Manual Page For ditto). The downside to ditto in incremental backups, is that it doesn't delete items in the backup that have been deleted in the source.

If you're more into GUI backups, I might try and dig something up... well, not much more digging that a simple google search for "OS X backup utility".

Hi - As far as whether to only clone, this posting made sense to me that it's better to both clone and do a back up. http://matt.makalumedia.com/archives/000833.html he uses synchronize pro which has great reviews, but is expensive. hence, my half-formulated plan to use superduper in conjunction with another app. there's a 2 part article in macworld (actually, an excerpt from the take control series of books) that also advocates both clone and archive.

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